Beware: human cloning risks creating monsters

9 April 2002 — 10:00am

'It is simply a matter of determination, and we are determined," declared Panos Zavos six months ago when asked whether it was possible that he and colleague Severino Antinori could clone a human. If the announcement in Abu Dhabi last week is to be believed, their "determination" has paid off - the doctors have implanted a cloned human embryo inside a woman's womb.

While the announcement has been met with scepticism, it is not impossible that Antinori and Zavos have done what they claimed. The techniques for "single nuclear transfer" are now fairly well understood, and have been used in a host of species since Dolly the sheep nearly six years ago became the first cloned animal to be born.

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Antinori and Zavos do not have the expertise to implant a cloned human embryo themselves, but they could hire scientists who do. They have the money: the desire to have a child can be so strong that it can overcome even the visceral revulsion that cloning a human generates in most people.

That explains why there is no shortage of childless couples willing to pay exorbitant fees for the chance to be experimented on by Antinori and Zavos. They say that they have almost 5000 volunteers. The woman chosen to implant the embryo is said to be the wife of a Saudi billionaire willing to commit unlimited resources to the project.

No surprises there, then.

But implanting an embryo is a long way from producing a healthy cloned baby. The great majority of cloned animals die as the foetus develops. The success rate is less than one in 200. To produce Dolly, it took 277 embryo implants before there was a successful pregnancy. Other projects to clone animals since Dolly was born have experienced the same appallingly high rate of attrition.

Furthermore, if they do not die prematurely, cloned animals are born with serious defects, or develop them. Problems with the immune system, the lungs, the heart and the brain are very common.

No one knows quite why. One theory is that when the experimenters manipulate the cells to be cloned, they scrape off some surrounding molecules. Those molecules may play an important role in ensuring that genes are "switched on" in the right sequence, ensuring that each organ is in its proper location (so that, for instance, your brain cells end up in your head rather than in your stomach). By interfering with them, the experimenters may ensure that the developmental process cannot proceed properly.

All that is certain is that serious developmental problems have emerged in practically every case. Dolly is exceptional in her rude health - and even she has arthritis, although that may just be the result of too much gambolling during photo shoots.

Antinori and Zavos have insisted that "we won't create monsters - we have made the technique safe". The animal experiments that have produced the defective animals have been "poorly designed and carried out", they say - adding that "humans are different". Their claims are fraudulent.

The only relevant way in which cloning humans is different from cloning animals is that developmental defects are more likely, not less.

"There is no method for screening defects in clones," says Dr Harry Griffin, of the Roslin Institute, which cloned Dolly. "Antinori and Zavos are operating completely in the dark. That is why it is so appallingly irresponsible to try this procedure with people."

It is doubtful if Antinori and Zavos would have quite so many women willing to pay to be implanted with cloned embryos if they told the truth about the likely consequences: aborted foetuses, dead babies, or, if they are lucky, severely handicapped children who die early.

Antinori and Zavos will not have told them, possibly because the people who they deceive most completely are themselves - they seem actually to believe their own publicity.

But then neither Antinori nor Zavos have much knowledge of the molecular biology of reproduction. Antinori's claim to fame rests on delivering IVF to a woman, 62. Zavos made a small splash when he was fired from an Alabama hospital for "unethical and illegal behaviour", including keeping the money for a procedure which he had no part in performing, and charging $US1400 when it should have cost $US60.

Fanned in part by Antinori and Zavos, whose antics only help to spread the vision of clones as chemically created Frankensteins, there is now considerable opposition to any cloning technology. President George Bush has banned it in the US and the European Parliament wants to ban it.

Yet properly developed, cloning holds the hope of a medical revolution. Using cloned cells to produce clusters of cells rather than whole people, it may be possible to "grow" parts of the body that have been destroyed or ceased to function properly.

If Antinori and Zavos turn out to have a long-term legacy, it will be one that blights the future by retarding beneficial cloning research.

Alasdair Palmer is a columnist with The Sunday Telegraph, London, where this article FIrst appeared.